We will be having a pane at PAX! After Notch: The New Minecraft Team will be on Saturday at 4:30pm in the Kraken theater - more information here. For those of you who can’t make it Twitch.tv will be livestreaming our session!

PAX Volunteers

We’re looking for some helpful volunteers to work with us at our booth at PAX Prime in Seattle, August 31st to September 2nd. You must already have a PAX badge, and be over 18 years old.

If you’re interested, please click here and give us some information about yourself. See you at PAX!

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Volunteers will get specialness… just saying.

So you want to know about Minecon…

Later this afternoon the official site will be online! Registration won’t start until next week, but this will give you all the information you’ve been waiting for and the EXACT time registration starts!

The recent two weeks Dinnerbone and I (jeb_) have worked a lot on new features, both our own and suggestions from the community. Before you ask, the API that will allow you to do your own features is waiting for a large restructuring of the render engine to be completed. I’ll write more about this in a future blog post.

So while you wait for that, here are the changes in this week’s snapshot:

Added item frames

Added cobblestone walls (yes, mossy too)

Maps now align to a grid, making it easier to create adjacent maps. Maps can also be cloned

Stairs now auto-arrange into corners. This is a test and may change based on feedback

Mobs can travel through portals

Leather clothes can be dyed

Removed the “wip block” from the creative menu

Added two new crops and associated items

F3+P will toggle the auto-pause when the window loses focus (it’s for debugging, mainly)

F3+H will toggle detailed item descriptions (also for debugging)

Added arrow-sensitive wooden buttons

Trapdoors can be placed in top-most position (based on cross-hair aim)